VIII

YES, THEY’RE AFTER MR. COZAD NOW like buffalo gnats after a pink-eared dude,” Sam Atkinson admitted to Griffith and a couple of other young fellows donating a little work at the schoolhouse. There had been an increasing disrespect for the community builder since the drouth and grasshoppers struck. Particularly since that matter of the money in the wheelbarrow, grown to a pile of gold coins a foot high in all the retelling.

“And the charge of ‘Copperhead’ shouted against him by a man from Ohio who maybe ought to know,” one of the helpers said.

No, not Ohio, Pennsylvania, young Griffith thought.

Sam Atkinson sorted out a sheaf of nails for his mouth. “That man was a Hoosier,” he said. “But it could have been almost anybody now, with ‘Copperhead’ a bad word handy for any dirty tongue, like ‘niggerlover’ and ‘scalawag’ in the South, or ‘Tory’ after the Revolution—–”

The others nodded as they measured and sawed. Nobody mentioned King O’Dell, perhaps because he and his accusations made such racy talk now where there had been too much gloom. People were ready to enjoy the discomfiture of the more fortunate, particularly off around Plum Creek, with some talk of raiding the settlement of that notorious gambling man Cozad.

“After the evil places running open around here?” the Plum Creek doctor asked, but privately. He was known to be from Ohio and a friend of some at Cozad.

The talk was evidently only talk, for outside of a penny-ante game down at the livery stable now and then, or perhaps a little crap shooting on a horse blanket in the back stall, men honing to risk a bit of money had to look elsewhere. Then one evening late a covered wagon came in from the east to the back lot of the livery stable. Before the tugs were down a folded table was lifted out over the endgate, carried inside, and maneuvered up the narrow steps to the hayloft, the whole front end of which was emptied, ready.

From that night business seemed to boom at the stable, although the stalls were seldom filled and few rigs except the schooner stood in the back lot. Horsebackers tied to the hitch rack outside and went in. Some spanking teams waited there too, particularly nights, and some of the Cozaders took to slipping down.

The colonizer was still away with his little black gripsack and Traber off on a round of dental stands, so old Robert Gatewood made an errand down at the stable. Somebody must have seen him coming. The four, five men around there were at an empty stall, acting ready to start for home. He took his neats-foot oil and stopped in at the store to talk to his wife and then to Dave Claypool at the Meridian office. A few minutes later Dave drove off to the river with him, caught up one of the bridge horses, and rode away through the brush.

Nothing was said to Theresa. She had kept closer to her work the last couple of weeks and the boys avoided the jibes about King O’Dell too. This afternoon the mother had let them give their fattening horses a good run. They went south across the river, straight into a late-flying swarm of buffalo gnats. They stretched out a quarter of a mile, like a shimmering veil in the autumn sun, fine as dust and biting fiercely, with winter so close—getting into the eyes and ears, the horses faunching and wild, unable to outrun them. At a more prosperous settler’s shack the boys begged a few drops of coal oil for the corners of their red bandannas. With these under their hats, the stinking corners out and flying, and with some of the oil wiped lightly over the ears and faces of the horses, they started home, singing a little, the gnats dropping away from the hated stink.

Outside of Emigrant House they met one of the Pearson boys with some of his friends from Plum Creek, just riding past, they said, and stopping in at Mother Gatewood’s for supper. They made a laughing meal of it, with jokes and riddles, and telling about the gnats the Cozad boys ran into, the old buffalo bull the others had tried to locate in the breaks off northwest. Then they sat around and listened to one of the boys blow his harmonica while Johnny pulled at the accordion a landseeker had left as security for his board bill.

When the Plum Creekers said they had to start home, Johnny and Robert went along to the livery stable for their horses. Inside, they heard laughing up in the hayloft. The stablekeeper stuck his head down the trap door, motioning them to come up. Johnny hesitated but the older boys went, and stomped around up there, laughing so that Robert was curiotis. He climbed the narrow steps far enough to see a lantern hanging to a rafter and a big poster with a snarling tiger. A man was standing next to a rack with pictures of playing cards on the tabs. It was an odd contraption and the boy took a couple more steps to see, and then clear up into the smoky loft beside the other boys. They were watching four, five men sitting around a rickety old table opened long. The top had pictures of all the spades on it, ace to king, in two even rows, the seven out at the side. A couple had chips on them. Back of the table sat a red-faced man with a deck, face up, in an open-topped box, his fingers sliding the top card out at a slit in the side. He laid it on the soda, the exposed pile, next to his stacks of white, red, and blue chips, while the marker checked it off on the contraption against the wall.

Johnny followed Robert, tugging at his coattail, but the boy had to watch as the dealer slid out the next card. A trey came up and one of the men at the table pushed the tall stack of blue chips on the jack from him, turned, and stumbled past the boys and down the steps.

Those left at the table looked around at the newcomers and, settled back, easing their seats. The dealer reached under the table for the whisky bottle, offered it around, drank, and set it back. The livery-stable keeper turned his head toward the spittoon. With his mouth emptied, he told the gamblers who Johnny and Robert were.

“Just dropped in to see a little fun,” he added.

“Welcome,” the dealer said, and motioned Robert up closer, to see better. “As you know, Master Cozad, faro’s a mighty easy game. All you got to do is pick the right card, win or lose, any way you bet it.”

While he talked he emptied the box and, adding the pile, shuffled the lot slowly, clumsily, compared to the swift and even flow that the Cozad sons had seen when they caught their father unawares a few times—keeping in practice, he called it, for when he got his hand on a deck.

The dealer replaced the pack in the box. “Now you figure out what value the card under the soda, the top one, will be, and lay your bets.”

Robert nodded, grinning, pleased that it was so clear to him, but not moving to a bet. The Plum Creek boys did buy a few chips, white. “Not stacks, just five, six each, and a red too,” one of them said, laying the money down.

The dealer nodded good-humoredly toward the marker. “We’ll deadhead the young sports a little,” he agreed.

The boys placed chips on a scattering of cards while one of the men at the end piled reds on the queen and placed a penny on top, coppering the bet.

“He’s mad at the ladies, betting on the queen to lose,” the dealer told the boys, winking a thick-lidded eye.

Now Robert did move up closer, resisting Johnny’s more urgent tug. This was just like seeing a story acted out. He watched as the dealer slipped the soda card away and the losing card came lip, not a queen but a six. The coppering player turned to the few reds he had left, fingering them as the next card, the winner, showed up a ten. It paid one of the Plum Creek boys. At the sight of the house chips pushed toward him he looked back to the Cozads, his eyes suddenly gleaming in the lantern light, as he nodded to let his bet and the winnings ride.

When everything was down, the ten was drawn out and dropped to the soda pile, exposing the second losing card, the copperer losing on the queen again. The ten repeated and the downy-cheeked young Plum Creeker whooped and let his redoubled stack ride once more as the counter racked up a second ten with a win.

Now the nine-year-old Robert Cozad felt himself pushing in against the table, resisting Johnny’s whisper “Come on.” He was fascinated by the game, by any game, but by this one particularly. The dealer offered him a stack of chips. “Complimentary,” he said. And when the boy couldn’t take them, he was offered the loan of a twenty-dollar bill. Embarrassed further by this generosity, and by his brother urging him to leave, Robert managed to say that they were not permitted to accept gifts of money or to borrow.

There was talk and sign-making over the boy’s head until the livery-stable keeper reached out for the bill. “Let me have it,” he said. “I owe Robert’s father some back rent on the place—” He folded the bill down small and slipped it into the boy’s breast pocket.

“The rent,” he said.

Robert was uneasy about this but he had often picked up payments on land sales, sometimes adding up to more than a hundred dollars before his father returned, so he said “Thank you” to the man and remained at the table.

While the game was resumed, one of the men went to the big hay door of the loft, worked to slide it back a few inches, and spit out, although he had been using the spittoon beside the table. As though surprised, he jumped back out of sight from the street and hurried to the dealer, saying something to his ear that sounded like “Three, four coming—” the rest lost in a shouting and roar downstairs, a stomping up the narrow steps. Suddenly Robert felt cold all down his belly for it was the silk hat of John Cozad that appeared in the trap door, with a couple of heads behind it—Dave Claypool and Traber—the latter there only a second and then gone.

The colonizer came up with an ax in his hand lifted high. He took one look all around—the fierceness of it shriveling his sons, and apparently the men beyond them too. All they did was jump back as the man brought the ax down upon the table, crashing through its rickety center, then again and again, splintering the wood to kindling, scattering the cards from the box like leaves to the wind.

By now the surprised dealer had drawn his gun. John Cozad took notice. “So you pull a gun on me on my own premises, you broken-down would-be jackleg!”

There was a stillness in the loft, with Robert perhaps the only one not afraid because he didn’t see the pistol, remembering only the bill in his pocket and that it was called rent money. He picked it out, still folded close, and tried to hand it to his father, who stood towering in contempt over the dealer and his gun but glancing to the man back at the hayloft door and making a motion to someone below. Immediately there was a noise of running boots, their stomping coming up the stairs until a burly man with a deputy star on his coat appeared, gun out, three others in a row just behind him.

The gambling men and the stablekeeper lined up almost before they were given the order, pushing the furious John Cozad back beside the Plum Creek boys. Then, almost as though he knew what to expect, the man with the star stalked to the youngest boy there, Robert Cozad, and jerked the folded bill from his hand. Opening it, the man grinned sourly.

“So, Mr. Cozad, you not only run a gambling hell for the young but put counterfeit money in the hands of your innocent kid, to—–”

“Counterfeit?” the colonizer demanded, and after a glance at the bill he ignored the man as though he and his gun were not there. “Where did you get this?” he demanded of his son, his voice filling all the loft.

And to the dealer’s shout, “From his pocket!” all Robert could do was motion to the stablekeeper. “I wouldn’t take it from the card man, and so he loaned it to Mr. Joe, and he gave it to me on the rent—–”

“He’s a damn liar, like his old man!” the dealer shouted. “Put the cuffs on Cozad! String him up!”

Now suddenly the colonizer saw his danger and cooled, became the man of faro. He looked all around the loft, as the stablekeeper, long ago ordered out the first of next month, at the man with handcuffs dangling, ready, and to the one with the star, his pistol still upon John Cozad.

“Ah, gentlemen,” the man of faro said genially, rubbing his palms together as becomes a good host. “So you have gathered for a little game?” He stooped to pick up several of the cards, arranging them, but looking under his heavy brows toward the trap door, where Traber, the red-bearded agent, old Robert, and several others were coming up in sock feet, silent under the noise, and armed, even Johnny there, peering out from behind the others.

Now John Cozad scooped the last of the cards together and as he straightened up, his hand shot out, grabbing, not the gun but the star, grabbed it, jerked it off.

“Frauds! All frauds and impostors!” he roared, and motioned toward Traber and the double-barrel buck gun in his hands, the agent behind him holding up a telegram.

“He’s a fraud all right,” Sanderson said. “I telegraphed Sheriff James at Plum. He has no deputies out.”

 

It was far past Robert’s bedtime when the livery stable was finally dark and the boys scolded for letting themselves be trapped like that, scolded now, to save their mother knowing more about this than could be helped. Leaving old Robert, Traber, and Johnny to sleep in the stable, to watch, John Cozad and Robert started home, the light of the lantern flickering over the ground before them. The boy hopped on one foot and then the other, forgetting himself in his excitement, making a singsong of the evening, but out loud. “Now I know, now I know, how to make $50,000—”

The father stopped short, the light thrown upward from the lantern on his face, gaunt, hollow, his eyes suddenly empty holes. The boy saw and trembled, for the anger there now was greater than any all this night.

“I didn’t mean it—” he started to say, trying to keep his voice from whimpering, but his father grabbed him by the neck and marched him across to the family stable, and in at the door. There he set the lantern down and took the yellow buggy whip from the socket. Once, twice, three times he cut it hard across his son’s stockinged legs, until the boy was gasping to keep from crying out and then crumpled sobbing into the straw.

Slowly John Cozad replaced the whip, his face bone white in the lantern.